Killing Birds

It reunites all the right elements to be a fun b-horror flick (but the title is misleading)

I admit that when it comes to the horror genre, I can be a conformist. I enjoy quality films, acceptable flicks, mediocre movies and even plain bad ones. I'd say that "Killing Birds: Raptors" could be considered a "good bad movie", and I cannot understand how it got such a low rating on IMDb. Despite of its evident flaws, it provides a decent amount of entertainment, gruesome kills, a reasonable share of creepy moments, fitting music and most of the action takes place inside a creepy old mansion, inhabited by rotting zombies. Honestly, what more can you possibly expect in an Italian horror film from the 80s? Oh, well...

In "Killing Birds: Raptors", the story (which has little to do with killer birds, just so you know), goes something like this: A soldier, returning from the war, comes home to find his wife in bed with another man, which prompts him to kill them both. Afterwards, he also kills another couple (presumably, his in-laws) and, then, the soldier is attacked by a bird that pokes one of his eyes out and causes severe damage in the remaining one, leaving the man blind (okay, what the hell was that?). We later see the deranged soldier being escorted by the police and saying goodbye to his baby, before being sent to jail or a mental institution.

Twenty years later, a group of young university students get together for a research, in which they must find out the whereabouts of a rare breed of woodpecker, which is about to be considered extinct. The work team consists of a group of seven youngsters, but our two main characters are Steve and Anne. Steve, like most of the other group members, is (presumably) a zoology student, while Anne studies journalism. The two aforementioned characters pay an unannounced visit to a man called Frederick Brown, who allegedly was one of the last persons to see the rare bird. The two college mates (and former couple, as it is h...